ORM tools for .NET

Jason Mauss has done an insanely good job of comparing Object-Relational mapping tools for .NET. I am most interested in trying NHibernate in conjunction with the Castle ActiveRecord implementation.

Don't miss the feature comparison table included in the guide.

AJAX Library Comparison

I have taken a quick look at some of the most popular AJAX libraries. Wow, I had no idea there were so many. Long story short, it looks like the pre-release Microsoft Atlas is not well documented enough (and probably not stable enough) to use just yet. There are many other integrated ASP.net + JavaScript solutions, but they all appear to be fairly home grown and narrow in their feature sets.

For dynamic JavaScript behaviors, I recommend trying the Yahoo UI libraries. They won’t do everything, but are fairly comprehensive, well documented, stable, and BSD licensed.

I also briefly tried a new IDE called Apatana which is free and specialized for JavaScript (and built on Eclipse). It is slick, and could be useful for prototyping behaviors before moving them into an ASP.net project. Its most useful features are JavaScript intellisense and built in sample projects.

Other contenders:

MS Atlas
Scriptaculous
Dojo – nice buttons and effects
Ajax.net (ajaxpro.info) – csharp samples
EmergeTk - .Net integrated, but broken demo site
MochiKit
AFLAX – Javascript + Flash
Prototype (base for scriptaculous)
Jquery – not many demos
Rico


Many more: .Net libraries: http://www.daniel-zeiss.de/AJAXComparison/Results.htm
Good blog: http://ajaxian.com

More Shopping 2.0

I posted recently about my favorite social shopping sites. I am continuing to brainstorm and prototype in this area. I wanted to update and my list to send it to a friend. Here is what has been influencing me lately.

I'm Lookmarking my research here: Social Shopping, and under the code name Shoptu.

* FashMatch.com - This one just showed up on the radar today. Create outfits with your friends.
* StyleHive, Kaboodle - leaders in social bookmarking for shopping (there are probably 10 other competitors in this category). There are a lot of shopping and style related blogs - many devoting their sidebars to the glam.com ad network.
* coverpop.com - fairly static but innovative user interface - see a lot of products at once.
* Etsy Sampler - I love the way this is interactive, but there is not much to do besides drag stuff around.
* http://shopping.live.com/ - Microsoft is really trying hard. I believe this indicates the limits of AJAX. An interactive shopping UI is going to have to be Flash. They have decent breadth but not enough depth to their product feeds.
* base.google.com - Google's open API gives them more products than Microsoft. It is interesting that Google is shying away from Froogle (removing it from the homepage). Is there something "richer" in the works, or are they content to become the middle man with the Base API?

Blur - Country House

He's got morning glory and life's a different story,
Everything's going Jackanory

Ahh, so that's what that is.

Flash Tips

I dropped in on the Seattle Flash Meetup tonight. It was hosted in Pluggd's office.

I asked the group for tips for Flash newbies. Here is what AdrianK and Byron Canfield
suggested.

1. Get to know the sequence of events and their asynchronous nature. Don't approach action script with a procedural mindset, think asynchronously.

2. Whatch out for a maximum stack depth of 256 method calls. Avoid recursive methods.

3. Use hungarian notation for variable naming to avoid make the lack of strong typing more palatable.

4. Don't worry too much about the number of movie clips or memory leaks, but do try and re-use stage objects when possible.

5. If you want a richer SDE, use PrimalScript, Eclipse, or Sepy.

6. Spread frame labels, code, and comments over multiple layers for better readability.

7. Set up a button for skipping between sections of your movie.

8 For more samples, see also Byron's flash examples.